Old Quebec: The Fortress of New France. Claude Glennon Bryan
condition grew deplorable. A terrible scurvy assailed the camp, and out of a company of one hundred and ten, twenty-five died, while only three or four of the rest escaped its ravages. The flint-like ground defied their feeble spades, and the dead bodies were hidden away in banks of snow. To make matters still worse, the Indians grew first indifferent, and then openly hostile. Cartier was sorely beset to conceal from them the weakness of his garrison. At last, however, a friendly Indian told him of a decoction by which the scurvy might be cured. The leaves of a certain evergreen were put to brew, and this medicine proved the salvation of the decimated company.
By and by came the spring; and when at last sun and rain had loosed the fetters of ice, Cartier determined to return to France. Before the ships weighed anchor, however, Donnacona and four of his companions were enticed on board, and with these sorry trophies the French captain turned his prows homeward. At midsummer-time the storm-battered ships glided once more into the rock-bound harbour of St. Malo.
Five years elapsed before France sent another expedition into the New World. The perennial conflict with Charles V. kept the French king's mind fixed on his home dominions, and Chabot, Cartier's former patron, had fallen upon evil times. At last, however, a new adventurer appeared in the person of the Sieur de Roberval, a nobleman of Picardy. The elaborate but almost incomprehensible text of the royal patent described the new envoy as Lord of Norembega, Viceroy and Lieutenant-General in Canada, Hochelaga, Saguenay, Newfoundland, Belle Isle, Carpunt, Labrador, the Great Bay, and Baccalaos. Under him Cartier was persuaded to take the post of Captain-General. The objects of the enterprise were discovery, colonisation, and the conversion of the Indians; albeit the instruments for this pious purpose were more than doubtful, their five ships being freighted for the most part with thieves and malefactors recruited from the prisons of France.
ARRIVAL OF JACQUES CARTIER AT QUEBEC, 1535
An unexpected delay occurring at St. Malo, it was determined that Cartier should sail at once, and that Roberval should follow as soon as possible with additional ships and supplies. Accordingly, on the 23rd of May, 1541, Cartier again spread his sails for the West, and after a stormy passage arrived in the St. Lawrence. The uncertain attitude of the Indians, however, prompted him to establish his colony further westward than Stadaconé, and he continued his course up the river and dropped anchor at Cap Rouge.
Summer and autumn passed away and brought no sign of Roberval. A gloomy winter further damped the spirits of the colonists at Charlesburg-Royal; and when the ice had gone out of the river, Cartier gathered his company back into the ships and set sail again for France. At Newfoundland he encountered the belated Roberval. High words were exchanged, and, as a result, the fiery Viceroy sailed alone to New France; and Cartier, bidding Canada a last farewell, held on his way to St. Malo.
Francis Parkman transcribes from the manuscript of Thevet the following incident which marked Roberval's voyage:—"The Viceroy's company was of a mixed complexion. There were nobles, officers, soldiers, sailors, adventurers, with women, too, and children. Of the women, some were of birth and station, and among them a damsel called Marguerite, a niece of Roberval himself. In the ship was a young gentleman who had embarked for love of her. His love was too well requited, and the stern Viceroy, scandalised and enraged at a passion which scorned concealment and set shame at defiance, cast anchor by the haunted island (the Isle of Demons), landed his indiscreet relative, gave her four arquebuses for defence, and with an old woman nurse who had pandered to the lovers, left her to her fate. Her gallant threw himself into the surf, and by desperate effort gained the shore, with two more guns and a supply of ammunition. The ship weighed anchor, receded, vanished; they were left alone. Yet not so, for the demon-lords of the island beset them day and night, raging round their hut with a confused and hungry clamouring, striving to force the frail barrier. The lovers had repented of their sin, though not abandoned it, and Heaven was on their side. The saints vouchsafed their aid, and the offended Virgin, relenting, held before them her protecting shield. In the form of beasts and other shapes abominably and unutterably hideous, the brood of hell, howling in baffled fury, tore at the branches of the sylvan dwelling; but a celestial hand was ever interposed, and there was a viewless barrier which they might not pass. Marguerite became pregnant. Here was a double prize—two souls in one, mother and child. The fiends grew frantic, but all in vain. She stood undaunted amid these horrors, but her lover, dismayed and heart-broken, sickened and died. Her child soon followed; then the old woman nurse found her unhallowed rest in that accursed soil, and Marguerite was left alone. Neither reason nor courage failed her; and when assailed by the demons, she shot at them with her gun. They answered with hellish merriment, and thenceforth she placed her trust in Heaven alone. There were foes around her of the upper, no less than of the nether, world. Of these the bears were the most redoubtable, yet as they were vulnerable to mortal weapons, she killed three of them—all, says the story, 'as white as an egg.'
"It was two years and five months from her landing on the island, when, far out at sea, the crew of a small fishing-craft saw a column of smoke curling upward from the haunted shore. Was it a device of the fiends to lure them to their ruin? They thought so, and kept aloof. But misgiving seized them. They warily drew near, and descried a female figure in wild attire waving signals from the strand. Thus, at length, was Marguerite rescued, and restored to her native France, where, a few years later, the cosmographer Thevet met her at Natron, in Perigord, and heard the tale of wonder from her own lips." [3]
FRANCOIS XAVIER DE LAVAL, FIRST BISHOP OF QUEBEC
Meanwhile, Roberval sailed on up the St. Lawrence, and established himself at Cap Rouge, in the deserted forts of Charlesburg-Royal built by Cartier. But the inexperience and imprudence of the haughty Viceroy soon put his establishment in sore straits. Ignorance of physical conditions and disregard of natural laws of health had always been the chief cause of suffering among these transatlantic exiles, and Roberval now added a lamentable want of perception and solicitude. Unlike Cartier, the inexorable Viceroy did not recognise his colonists as companions in privation, but ruled them with a rod of iron. The pillory, the whipping-post, and the scaffold were distressing features in his system. Then came winter, famine, and the scurvy. Fifty of the settlers died, and by spring even the headstrong Roberval was ready to forsake his enterprise. His departure ends the earliest period of French adventure in America.
CAP ROUGE
Thenceforth, for more than half a century, France writhed in civil war, and spared no vessel to explore the great river of Canada. For all these years New France was left to its aboriginal inhabitants and to fate.
CHAPTER II
THE ERA OF CHAMPLAIN
The name of Champlain must ever stand before all others in the history of Quebec. He was the founder of the city, and for more than a quarter of a century he was its very life. If repeated disappointment and misfortune could have brought this great empire-builder to despair; if obstacles apparently impossible to overcome could have turned the hero from his purpose, Quebec would not be to-day the oldest city in the western hemisphere. As it was, his character gave the keynote not only to the great fortress-capital, but to the whole history of New France. He was an embodiment at once of the religious zeal and of the mediæval spirit of romance which carried the Bourbon lilies into the trackless wilderness of North America, at a time when English colonisation